The Winged and the Horned by Tammy C. Greenwood

In Tammy C. Greenwood’s The Winged & the Horned, the complex, often lonely grief of pregnancy loss & infertility is juxtaposed by the wonder & devastation ever-present in the natural world. In both, we find “fingers checking every fruit / for ripeness” and a moon which rises even though “all there’ll ever be is darkness.” From backyard garden to outer space, womb to Lake Superior, bedside of the addict to bedside of the child who wishes for wings, these poems read as incantations for all that we have lost & all that we may still hold.

–Joan Kwon Glass, author of Daughter of Three Gone Kingdoms

“I wonder what it feels like to surrender,” remarks the speaker of Tammy C. Greenwood’s The Winged & the Horned, a luminous and deeply-felt account of the speaker’s refusal to accept the harrowing and unruliest facts of her experience—the grief of infertility, the death of her father, the endless well of love that proves powerless to save those she cares about most. But in Greenwood’s hands, pain is not an end but the basis for possibility, the natural world transformed into mirror, solace, counterpoint, and dream: a tortoise mothering a hippo, an empty den, the soon-to-be flourishes of wild heliotrope, all of which provide the speaker with material to construct an alternate womb, one built of the quiet sorrow, tender thinking, and hard-earned grace that collect in the aftermath of living. And just as the “newness of a repeated sunset” or a “sky [that] resembles a Turner sea,” the language here is “yet another wonder making it all worthwhile,” what is as beautiful as what could have been.

–Susan L. Leary, author of Dressing the Bear